This Romanesque Revival building, the oldest Lutheran Church in the West, was designed by architect Henry Geilfuss.
It suffered little damage during the 1906 earthquake and was saved from the fire by the dynamiting of the buildings on Van Ness Avenue one block away.

The circular apartment building in the first photograph is the Carillon Tower built after hundreds of Victorian homes in the Western Addition were bulldozed by the San
Francisco Redevelopment Agency leaving a huge wound which has not healed.

Romanesque Revival architecture, which was based on medieval and early Christian Romanesque cathedrals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,
originated in the early nineteenth century in Munich, Germany.

Romanesque Revival buildings in the United States are simpler than their European counterparts. Common
features of the style in the United States include:

molded semicircular arches for window and door openings

molded beltcourses that divide the exterior into horizontal bands

the Lombard band which is a series of miniature arches located below the eaves

New churches, schools, and public buildings were increasingly designed in an imposing variant of the Romanesque Revival style in the nineteenth century
in the United States. Diplomats, theologians, educational reformers, clergymen, and rulers supported Romanesque Revival architecture in large part because
of the style's many associations with the staunch faith and communal solidarity of the early Christian era.

There were two phases of Romanesque Revival in the United States. Early Romanesque Revival structures of the 1840s-1850s resembled their Gothic predecessors
with accurate interpretations of early Mediaeval forms. The best-known example of early Romanesque Revival in the United States is the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington built between 1846 and 1855.

A later phase, Richardsonian Romanesque, originated in the 1870s in the work of the Boston-based architect Henry Hobson Richardson who attended Harvard and
L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. He was inspired by Romanesque architecture in Spain and the south of France and experimented with these and a variety
of other sources to create his own unique style typically characterized as massive, weighty buildings clad in polychromed and rough-hewn stone and punctuated
by Syrian arches and sculpted Byzantine capitals.

The style was not used in San Francisco until the late 1880s. Although known by local architects, the style was not initially embraced due to its cost
and its use of earthquake-prone masonry construction. Most early examples were designed by out-of-state architects, particularly Burnham & Root, who were early
adopters of the style in their hometown of Chicago.